Soviet Bodies in Transition

Sex and Stereotypes in the Visual Satire of Late Perestroika

Bibliographic Data

ID2961342
AuthorsKateryna Yeremieieva (0000-0003-2835-0048, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume11
Issue2
Publication date2025-09-09
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueOpen Library of Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2056-6700 • E-ISSN: 2056-6700
PublisherOpen Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.16995/olh.23973
OpenAlexW4412551180
LanguageEN
References cited14

This article examines how late Soviet visual satire—particularly cartoons and caricatures—functioned as a vehicle for expressing and reinforcing gender stereotypes, with a specific focus on sexuality. The relative loosening of censorship under Perestroika permitted an increased presence of sexual humour in Soviet media. However, rather than indicating genuine liberalisation, this humour often reaffirmed patriarchal frameworks. In magazines such as Krokodil and Perets’, the female body frequently appears as a hypersexualised figure, commodified and rendered interchangeable with consumer goods. These representations did not critique dominant gender ideologies; instead, they naturalised them through visual codes of desire, scarcity, and submission. Employing an iconological approach, this article analyses how this visual rhetoric encoded broader cultural anxieties about gender, sex, and social change. Soviet cartoons simultaneously reflected and shaped discourse on sexuality, portraying it as both emancipatory and destabilising. Through an analysis of official satire, unofficial humour, and visual culture, this article explores how visual satire contributed to the evolution of gender discourses in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods

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